1 in 5 child deaths in auto accidents involves alcohol-impaired driver
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Key takeaways:
- One in five child deaths in motor vehicle crashes occurs in an accident involving an alcohol-impaired driver.
- In most cases, the child who died in the same car as the alcohol-impaired driver.
Around 20% of U.S. child passenger deaths in auto accidents from 1982 through 2020 involved an alcohol-impaired driver — typically the child’s own driver, according to a study.
“I’ve been working on traffic safety related issues for quite a while, and we were always concerned about the volume of these incidents,” Eduardo Romano, PhD, senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Beltsville, Maryland, told Healio. “Kids in these cases are innocent victims; they have no way to protest.”
According to another author, lawmakers have tried to combat these deaths through legislation.
“Most states in the country now have child endangerment laws,” Kyran Quinlan, MD, MPH, a pediatric medical advisor for the Illinois Department of Public Health, told Healio. “These are extra penalties [added] to a DUI if a DUI occurs while there's a child in the vehicle. It's an attempt to protect kids from drinking drivers, and those have expanded but they're quite varied in severity. The penalties vary from something quite mild, like a hand slap, all the way to felony charges.”
Quinlan said the efforts have not been as effective as hoped.
“The progress that was happening in previous analyses really has stalled,” Quinlan said. “The rate of this happening — of a child dying while being transported by an alcohol-impaired driver — has leveled off and actually has increased slightly toward the end of the decade,” Quinlan said.
The researchers examined data from the 2011 through 2019 editions of the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) Final Files, and the 2020 Annual Report Files from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding all child passengers aged younger than 15 years. FARS documents alcohol involvement through measuring chemical blood alcohol content (BAC) results. A total of 49 states have 0.08 g/dL as their BAC cutoff, whereas Utah has a cutoff of 0.05 g/dL.
Of the 7,944 child passengers who died in motor vehicle crashes from 2011 to 2020, 22% died in crashes involving an alcohol-impaired driver with a BAC of 0.08 g/dL or greater. In this subgroup, 64% died while riding in the same vehicle as an impaired driver. Additionally, 69% of impaired drivers survived the crash that killed their child passenger.
The majority of fatal crashes involved a single vehicle (60%) and occurred at night (65%). The researchers also noted that the higher the blood alcohol concentration of the child’s driver, the less likely the child passenger who died was restrained in the crash — especially if the child was older.
“The majority of the time when a child passenger dies while being driven by an alcohol-impaired driver, it's usually the child's own driver, and that is different than what maybe people have thought,” Quinlan said. “But it has really important implications for prevention.”
Endangerment laws with enhanced DUI penalties have not been shown to be effective, partly because they are not consistently enforced, the researchers said. They suggested possible interventions, including a wider use of measures to address alcohol-impaired driving, such as an expanded use of alcohol ignition interlock devices for drivers convicted of DUI, lowering current blood alcohol concentration limits and programs for repeat offenders.
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